Facebook Makes Moves on Instagram Users
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Like the article says, Instagram is absolutely an escape from the hostile interfaces and hostile posts that abound on core Facebook. It's still cool and it's still fun. Whatever the internal power dynamics, it seems unlikely that Facebook would be stupid enough to throw this away. What do they care if their bread gets buttered through the Instagram app?
Another interesting thing to note about Instagram is that a high follower count has become a status symbol. As people invest time and effort in building a large following, their commitment to the platform increases. It wouldn't surprise me if Instagram accounts for more than half of Facebook's value in the near future.
Three things immediately come to mind:
A. They paid a lot of money to acquire Instagram and want that investment to pay off.
2. There are users on Instagram from whom Facebook can extract value and profit.
D. If there is a way to make a buck off a user and their activity on a Facebook property, rest assured FB will take the step to make that buck.
For thoughts in text I think twitter is a better platform than fb.
This sentiment expresses the difference between being 20 and being 40. Over the years, you will witness many companies snatching defeat from the jaws of victory for no fathomable reason.
Currently, users in my Instagram social group are pretty unhappy with the change to a filtered feed, which produces a lack of visibility. This is exactly like the Facebook newsfeed, Where I can post something to my 2000, 500 friends… It gets no likes and no comments, compared to posting in a group with basically the same member where the same content receives plenty of attention, because it was actually displayed to the people who chose to follow me, without me giving Facebook money. There’s not much point in having 8,000 followers if they only show it to 2 percent of them.
Define worse, because basically every metric I'm aware of says that instagram is more popular and has higher user engagement than ever.
I think your "filtered feed" complaint is something that really ticks off a narrow segment of users, but that the remaining 99% doesn't care about at all. All they notice is a more interesting and relevant feed. Look at it this way - basically every major social network (instagram, twitter, facebook, youtube, etc) has implemented some sort of filtered feed. Every time some small segment of tech-savvy users or power users gets extremely annoyed and complains loudly, but I'm unaware of any network reversing the decision and going back to pure chronological - to me, that says that their internal engagement numbers overwhelmingly justify the decision.
Like I said above, I feel they have made it worse by adding more and more features. They added video, and that was cool. They added messaging, which that was handy. They successfully copied Snapchat, and that was a plus, I guess. They added a location map, OK. Tagging people’s faces in photos... live video with endless notifications... and now IGTV, which is heavily promoted despite being very different than the original app. It’s definitely what I would call feature and mission creep. My opinion is that Instagram was good and successful in the first place because it simple, like Twitter. It appears to me their intention is to replace the old Facebook product with Instagram, probably because younger people don’t use Facebook much. I would guess this is partially because FB is so cluttered and full of unnecessary and annoying features. That’s the direction I see the Instagram app heading in, which is not what their audience wants.
When I repeatedly post on my FB wall and receive no interaction, I stop posting. When my FB newsfeed is full of annoying political topics, though I unfollowed the last 20 people who posted about annoying political topics, it’s boring and frustrating to read it, so I stop. Then, when I go to the pages of actual friends and family members whose content I care about, and find they have posted things that have not been displayed to me while days of annoying political topics have been, it’s obvious that something isn’t working right.
- help users who follow few accounts, or follow low-volume accounts, seem like they have more content to look at; this helps retention
- lift viral content higher, to reward users producing popular content, and expose it to other users assuming wisdom of the crowds
- expose a different set of content on successive views; this helps engagement
- put ads in your feed with higher frequency, whose perceived density would be much more jarring given the reference points provided by the unchanged ordering of a chronological feed
In many cases, these changes disadvantage the most the sort of people the platform cares to retain the least.
Instagram added this a little while ago[1], which flies in the face of these "never-ending feed" complaints.
The people I know who use Instagram are a network of artists with very dedicated community. We notice right away how things affect our views and take it personally because we are chiefly individuals with nanobusinesses doing all our marketing ourselves, mainly on IG.
People were eager to move to Ello, Tsū and most recently Vero. It seems to be easier to get the content creators there than the audience.
Vanity is a helluva drug.
As a relatively new user, I would follow a lot of, lets say, good looking folks. I quickly realized that it had a huge detrimental effect on my self perception and image. Now I mostly follow friends and people I know, and maybe a few politicians but very few celebrities and such.
I don't visit every day but it is a nice break.
I mostly ignore stories.
I am a proud and highly entertained uncle with nieces and nephews ages 2 to 32.
> I find that young single people get jealous
But really the travel part is something that anyone could enjoy. People get interested in travel at all ages. The bug hit me only a couple of years ago but I know people way younger who want to travel.
If you think about it, SNAP would be doing a lot better if Facebook hadn't bolted on the stories feature on Instagram. The Facebook version of stories really really sucks.
All in hindsight of course. But it seems like a shame, a real missed opportunity to create value and stay independent at the same time.
Only until Facebook decides to weaken or eliminate its end-to-end encryption. It's surprising that feature has lasted this long, since it's so antithetical to Facebook's business model of slurping up every bit of personal data it can.
Both WhatsApp founders have left Facebook recently, and they were much more privacy focused than Zuckerberg and Sandberg. My understanding is they protected the WhatsApp team from the culture of the rest of Facebook, but now that they're gone I don't see that continuing in the same way.
And just remember, those were the two guys who thought that transport encryption was too expensive for a messaging app.
It's likely there will be changes to WhatsApp soon.
I would like to be optimistic, but the realist in me thinks the number of users for which end-to-end encryption is a vital feature is vanishingly small.
And maybe all FB needs to do to keep those users is to make end-to-end encryption on WhatsApp opt-in, so they can provide ~~"wonderful new features to you"~~ if you keep it off.
Facebook knows the lifecycle of social media networks, and knows that the way to stay in front of the inevitable decay is to watch like a hawk for the New Thing and either buy it (Instagram, WhatsApp) or clone it and stomp it with network effects (Snapchat).
The complicated bit is heading off anti-trust regulators.
Facebook could acquire 100 more Instagrams and have every single one of them fail - or even shut them down - without all that much dilution.
(Cisco and EMC from 1990-2010 are successful examples of this strategy. See DataDomain, Isilon, Cerent, and arguably Crescendo for example acquisitions.)
Same with vine and videos on ig
Exhibit A: https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/16/facebook-acquires-anonymou...
Exhibit B: https://www.engadget.com/2018/07/02/facebook-shuts-down-tbh-...
Obviously, antitrust laws are among the many things I know nothing about, but it still difficult for me to understand how they can allow facebook, instagram and whatsapp to be one corporation.
Corruption might be the explanation.
the US's legal framework for anti-trust come from the Sherman anti-trust act of 1890 and the Clayton anti-trust act of 1914 (note the dates). The jurisprudence basically holds that being a monopoly isn't illegal per se, but what's illegal is abusing consumers - traditionally the cause of action in anti-trust lawsuits are that a corporation does something anti-competitive to increase prices. Facebook is mostly available at no cost to consumers (or at least, consumers don't have to pay to use the products) and so they avoid anti-trust scrutiny.
To see it in practice, check out [1]. Some Japanese auto part suppliers were acting in an anti-competitive way and what got the DOJ so chuffed was that consumers had to pay more for cars and car parts because of the behavior.
The Yale law journal has a great expose on the tension between our 19th/early-20th century understanding of abusive monopolies and the realities of 21st century commerce [2] and basically the core issue is that anti-trust laws are powerless to stop a company from acquiring the power to become an illegal/abusive monopoly.
The EU has actually been much more skeptical/hostile of the arrangement between Facebook/Instagram/Whatsapp , and the best legal thinking on using anti-trust norms to break up big tech comes from the EU. Unfortunately, I don't know much about it and I'll invite any expert to weigh-in.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/japanese-auto-parts-company-p...
[2] https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-parado...
Anti-trust law doesn't prevent any form of consolidation. As a general guideline, the DOJ is only opposed to going from 3 to 2 competing offerings to customers.
Given the existence of countless other social networks, photo sharing websites and messaging apps, it would be hard to justify blocking any of these deals, especially in the case of Instagram which was still a very young and nimble company at the time of the acquisition.
With respect to Instagram, it's really not hard to understand - back in 2012 (when Facebook made the acquisition) Instagram had just 50 million users and made no money. It would have been ridiculous for anti-trust authorities anywhere in the world to step in. Remember too that the general consensus among a great many back then was that 1 billion dollars for Instagram was an absurd purchase price for what was perceived as a relatively tiny little start up with a very uncertain future.
While everyone likes to bash Facebook, the growth they have achieved with Instagram since acquiring it is pretty impressive, 50 million to a billion users in 6 or so years, and it's not like there wasn't significant competition along the way from Snapchat etc.
It obviously replaced Snapchat but also Facebook, Tinder, even WhatsApp. What are you friends up to? Check your friends' stories. Wanna see some beautiful stories? Check some influencers' stories. Wanna tease a party or share fun pictures during a party, only with your friends? Use Instagram Stories. This app is a dream for people in their twenties.
The number of use cases this app created and the engagement it causes (the delay between posting a story and when it is seen by friends is rarely more than a few minutes) is really astonishing. Facebook will likely not die anytime soon, but Instagram is now the app and its acquisition was one of the smartest moves in the history of Facebook. If you want to learn more about the acquisition, I strongly recommend this article: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2013/06/kara-swishe...
If you're in a major metro area in Japan and want to find the on-trend coffee joints, check out Instagram.
If you own a flooring company and a cabinet company, you're going to try to convince your flooring customers to buy your cabinets.
"Is Aquafina OK?"
If you didn't know Atmel was owned by Microchip and they didn't exactly scream that from the rooftops, you don't think that would be a relevant analogy here?
Get a life, world.
But for people who mistrust Facebook, that is more than reason to drop Instagram. The thinking is, "I've seen what Facebook has done to itself. It's only a matter of time before they do the same to Instagram. I might as well get out now and find some better alternative."
Speaking of dark patterns, few people probably ignore Instagram long enough to notice, but after weeks and weeks the app starts showing you head-fake notifications. They aren't mentions or messages, just 'alerts' that people you know are using Instagram and you should be looking.